What is swatting and is it getting worse?
Fake 911 calls intended cause a police response for a school shooting are called "swatting". The best way to stop this problem is for the police to get smart and stop responding to obvious hoaxes.
The college school year started with swatting hoaxes causing lockdowns and police responses at University of Arkansas, University of Colorado Boulder, Iowa State University, Kansas State University, University of New Hampshire, Northern Arizona University, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Villanova University, and University of South Carolina.
At each of these schools, someone called 911 to report a shooting on campus that wasn’t real. Meanwhile, during a real school shooting, there is a flood of 911 calls immediately. When a student opened fire inside Oxford High in Michigan in 2021, the 911 call center received more than 100 calls within the first minute. During the Nashville school shooting, there were also dozens of calls to 911 in the first minute of the attack. During the mass shooting on campus at Michigan State in 2023, there were more than 2,000 911 calls about the shooting.
Hint for police departments: If there is only one call about a school shooting in progress, there is a 99.999999% chance that it’s a hoax.
The goal of swatting is to get as many police officers as possible to respond to a hoax 911 call. But even after years of swatting, the pranksters keep winning as police departments fail to learn, adapt, and scale back these responses.
I had a daily swatting tracker on my website for the 2023-24 school year when a dozen or more k-12 schools in the same state would be swatted on the same day. After the arrest of multiple serial swatters (one swatter made hundreds of hoax calls to schools across the country), the problem at k-12 schools mostly faded. There are still a few swatting calls per week, but the current situation is nothing like it was in February and March of 2023.
My rough estimate of the minimum cost from swatting at schools in 2023 was about $82,300,000 and that’s just the cost of the police response. The real cost that includes missed class time, missed worktime for parents, and physical damage (e.g., breaking doors, police cars crashing on the way to the school, insurance settlements for injuries) is easily in the hundreds of millions.
Most swatting hoaxes are a single 911 call, often to a front desk or non-emergency 911 center number. Making false 911 calls to cause panic and a police response to a venue date back to the 1970s. In most swatting scenarios, someone makes an elaborate report like describing a hostage situation or multiple people shot inside the school to trigger the highest priority police response.
In 2015, swatting during live streamed video game competitions got mainstream attention. The calls are usually placed through voice-over-internet phone services with a VPN that renders them nearly impossible to trace.
A further complication for schools is that anonymous reporting apps have been mandated in many states which gives students an easy way to make a false report without getting caught. Schools are literally giving students (and anyone with an internet connection) a way to swat them.
Bogus Call, Real Dangers
Anytime officers respond code 3 (lights and sirens) for a shooting in progress at a school, there is a high level of danger. While police are driving 100mph towards the campus, the students and staff at the school usually have no idea there was even a threat made.
These are very real dangers as officers in Massachusetts and Colorado accidentally fired their guns inside occupied schools doing searches during swatting hoaxes. Officers in Michigan responding to a swatting hoax intentionally rammed their police car through the front door of the school to get inside faster (doors were locked and nobody inside the school knew about the hoax).
A school shooting is an “all hands” response meaning that every officer in the area, even those who are off duty, get an urgent alert. Here are a few things that can go very wrong during the police response:
Officer who runs into a school thinking there is an active shooter fires at the janitor who is holding a mop in the hallway.
Police cars speeding and driving through redlights can crash while responding.
Parents can be involved in traffic accidents trying to get to the school.
Confrontation between police and parents (post-Uvalde tension) can turn into assaults or shootings.
Blue-on-blue shootings can happen with a plainclothes officer or armed school security.
Accidental discharges happen when officers are running while carrying loaded weapons.
Armed teachers or armed parents might shoot someone during the confusion.
Students or teachers can be injured barricading classrooms or jumping out of windows.
These are very real risks. A Florida police officer shot himself in the leg inside a school during a response to a false report of a shooting the day after Parkland in 2018. During the response to the Colorado STEM school shooting in 2019, a school security officer shot at a plainclothes police officer and missed, hitting a student instead.
When these swatting hoaxes follow predictable patterns and the police response is discretionary, we need to focus on how to deescalate these situations before someone is seriously injured or killed.
Swatting can’t be stopped
I met with an association of telecom providers in 2023 to talk about tracing and blocking these swatting hoaxes. With a VOIP (internet service) call that can be generated with a free account made by an anonymous email, plus a VPN creating a bogus point of origin, there is no way to trace the call without a second piece of data to triangulate back. If these were ransom or scam calls that had a bank account to transfer money, that would be the second data point. But these pure hoax calls made over internet services cannot be blocked or traced.
There is also not a single reason that swatting calls are happening. They can be students playing pranks, foreign operatives trying to cause disruptions in the United States, or black market service just trying to make a few dollars for generating some fake 911 calls. The lack of a uniform purpose and method is exactly what makes these swatting calls so hard to stop.
Swatting Research with The Economist
I’ve been writing articles and giving news interviews about swatting since fall 2022 when the problem at k-12 schools started to become widespread.
Hoax school shootings: inside America's epidemic
The Economists graphics team put all the swatting hoaxes in February 2023 on this map. February 2023 was unique because serial swatters started placing calls to multiple schools in the same state on the same day (shown with the bigger circles). The total number of schools swatted and the frequency of the coordinated robocalls got even worse in March.
Break the Cycle by Removing Incentives
Each emergency dispatch that elects to send dozens—or even hundreds—of officers to these single call swatting hoaxes is perpetuating the cycle. This is a choice that police officials are making.
What we can do:
Intel bulletin from the FBI or Department of Homeland Security to local 911 centers with guidance about how to recognize swatting hoaxes.
When there is a call that sounds like a hoax, in addition to dispatching initial officers to investigate, a supervisor should call the school to find out if there is an attack taking place (or assume the worst nobody answers the phone). If everything is normal at the school, the police response can be cancelled. When there isn’t a shooting going on at the school, officers don’t need to drive through the front door!
When the first officer arrives at the school and there is no school shooting taking place, that officer needs to cancel the response. These response scale-backs happen every single day across the country when fire departments respond to 911 calls for fires that turn out to be false alarms.
We don’t have the power to stop someone from making prank 911 calls over the internet. We do have the power to learn, adapt, and scale back how police respond to swatting. The easiest way to stop swatting is to remove the incentives by stopping the large police response to these hoaxes.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
You failed to mention that in several of these recent incidents, such as the UT Chattanooga and Knoxville incidents, the 911 call taker could hear what resembled live gunfire in the background as the false report was received. In that instance, regardless of how many 911 calls are received, police are going to respond. I find it very hard to believe that with all of the technology we have available, we can't find a solution to tracing these criminals.